Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the role that Jordanian women's organisations play within an unequal North/South partnership and looks into how they take on the lead 'against the odds' when it comes to shaping and forming these partnerships to their ideal by using different forms of rightful resistance.

Paper long abstract:

Although today, the notion of partnership is omnipresent in North/South cooperation in development contexts, one partner often continues to financially (and to a certain extent discursively) depend on the other. This is especially the case for non-charity women's organisations in Jordan, where civil society is highly controlled and restricted, and state support for the promotion of women's rights is low and who therefore almost completely depend on their mostly Northern donors.

By combining Escobar's development discourse and O'Brien's concept of rightful resistance, the paper puts emphasis on the role that Jordanian women's organisations play within an unequal North/South partnership and looks into how they manage to take on a leadership position 'against the odds' when it comes to shaping and forming these partnerships to their ideal.

The paper is grounded in a two-month participant observation of a Jordanian women's rights organization and a series of qualitative interviews with their staff members and donor representatives conducted in Jordan between 2018 and 2020. It (1) investigates the divergences of how both the organisation and their donors define partnership and (2) looks into concrete situations in which the organisation attempts to reclaim partnership by performing three different forms of so-called rightful resistance: open resistance, covert resistance, and semi-open resistance.